I'm back to my good old Nokia E75. Officially called a smartphone, it runs Symbian which is as powerful as your average shoebox. It has a numeric keyboard and a slide-qwerty, which means that you can touch-type and blindly navigate even inside your pocket. It is so small it actually fits in the palm of

Self-driving carsTags: randomthought, other, real life.How much would you pay for a self-driving car? I'll let you think about that for a minute. Myself, I'd pay about all the money I could spend on it. The idea fascinates me and it really seems like an awesome future.

Not only will self-driving cars get you from A to B without having to drive, it will also prevent about a million deaths every year due to car crashes. It will likely solve all our traffic jam problems. It will make traveling by car faster because we no longer need speed limits for our slow human reflexes.

SSH tips (and GNU screen)Tags: tutorials, software, networking.Just a quick blogpost about some things for ssh that make my life easier. No more password typing, hostname, user and port remembering, or even losing your session when a connection drops. The latter didn't seem easy to find and I had to piece some things together, but I'll explain how to use ssh with gnu screen from step three onwards.

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Configure an ssh host config if you haven't already. This is not necessary, but boy does it make things easier. Do you want to remember that you're supposed to connect as user vhost89103 to ssh.pcextreme.nl, as user oa to the gameserver on port 222, as user ...

Do somethingTags: programming, software.I'm running GNU/Linux right now. For free. I can do pretty much everything Windows users can, and it's all free of charge and open source. According to Wikipedia, the kernel alone is worth billions of euros in development costs, let alone the three thousand other packages I have installed. Or the hosting costs of providing me with all these packages plus updates.

Every time I pause to look at what I'm running and realize it's all done by others for free, I feel like I'm in their debt. They wrote millions upon millions of lines of code and everyone can use it for free.

Using Tor as a sysadmin toolTags: networking, software.It's not every day that I get to combine the tags "networking" and "software". Using Tor as a sysadmin tool (system administration tool) is really neat and changes the way I can work with networks. Instead of having a bunch of firewalled and unreachable systems, I can now configure Tor and happily connect to any place I damn well please. Within computers that I own, of course, but at least I'm no longer bothered by routers and portforwarding.